Keys of Heaven (7 page)

I
t was far too soon to expect results, but Linda Peachey still gave Sarah an update, pausing as she crossed the lawn. “I drank two cups of meadow tea and a glass of tincture water yesterday,” she said with a glint of humor. “I thought you'd want to know.”

Sarah laughed and said, “I'm glad you did. Just keep it up for a month and see how you feel.”

“I'm going to ask the boys to look for some of the ingredients when they're rambling around in the woods. Benny has sharp eyes.”

As Linda returned to her family, Sarah wondered again at Arlon's allowing two grown boys to run so wild. Did they have chores at all? Because looking at that farm, you'd sure believe they didn't. Well, they'd all see it in two weeks, because Arlon and Ella's house was next in the rotation.

Now that the lunch was over, the men had begun loading the benches into the bench wagon, while the women boxed up the plates, cups, and silverware and put them in their cubbyholes. Everything had its place, and the wagon went from home to home so that no one family bore the burden of keeping seating and eating utensils for use only once a year or so by the two dozen families in the
Gmee
. In minutes, the job was done, and the cupboards and doors closed up.

Sarah was hovering around Evie's big garden when she felt an arm slip around her waist. “Covet not thy neighbor's flowers,” Amanda teased. “I see what you're looking at.”

Sarah squeezed back. “I don't think that's in the Scriptures.”

“Maybe not specifically, but I'm sure the spirit of it is there. What's caught your eye?”

“I was thinking of making a skin preparation for you and I to try, and the recipe calls for four cups of rose petals. I wonder if Evie would let me have a paper bag full?”

“You wouldn't. Evie loves them so much. Nobody can grow roses like she can, and these have just hit their peak. Surely you don't want to spoil them by tearing all their petals off?”

“I wouldn't tear them off…here. But you can see that they could use a little thinning. It would be good for the plants.”

“I'm sure Evie will see it that way.”

Sarah had to laugh. “All right. I'll wait a couple of days until they're just past their best, and offer to help her thin them in exchange for some of this facial splash.”

Amanda's gaze turned curious. “So you're coming to enjoy it, then, being a
Dokterfraa? 
”

“I'm not one, I told you. I'm just learning. But it's interesting. I think my mother was an herbalist—not like Ruth, preparing things as a business, but because it came naturally to her. She might even have learned it from her mother.” She drew in a long breath, scented with roses and marigolds. “I wish I'd known back then. I could have learned from her instead of starting from scratch.”

“Maybe when you get more experience, you could—” Amanda stopped, gazing past Sarah's shoulder, and Sarah turned to see Silas Lapp strolling up, hands in his pockets, smiling as though he was enjoying the picture they made.

That Amanda made.

“Hallo, Silas,” Sarah said in a sisterly tone. “It didn't take long for you boys to get the benches put away.”

“It never does when so many hands share the work. What are you looking at?”

“Evie's roses,” Amanda said shyly. “God has given her a gift with them, but we're the ones who enjoy the benefit of it.”

“God has given our bishop's wife many gifts,” Sarah said. “She's an accomplished quilter, and I hear there's another baby on the way, too.”

“I'm sure His hand was just as generous with you,” Silas said. “I came to ask if you girls had a ride home.”

Why was he talking to them both but looking at her? “
Ja
, Caleb and I came in our buggy.” She craned to look around him for Zeke or her father-in-law, Jacob. “Did you get left behind?”

“If I try hard enough, I will,” he joked. “Then I could ride home with you.”

She laughed as if he'd made a joke. Of course he had.

Then he said, “You're coming for dinner at Jacob's,
ja? 
”

“
Ja
, I am.” She turned to Amanda. “Do you want to come home with Caleb and me, or are you staying for the singing?”

Amanda had joined church the year before, but until she was married, she could join the
Youngie
for singing and volleyball and games. Some people might think a twenty-year-old woman was too old for that, but how else was she to find a husband if she didn't go places with the singles?

“It's a fine afternoon,” Silas said. “You might have the chance of a drive.”

Amanda blushed, and to draw attention away from her, Sarah said, “If you had a buggy here, you could take her for one yourself.” Then she had a bright idea. “In fact, why don't you do that? I want a chance to visit with Zeke and Fannie, so you take Dulcie and Caleb and I will go with them.”

And before either of them had a chance to demur or make themselves scarce, she bustled off to arrange it with Zeke, who thought it a fine joke.

“I see what you're up to,” he said, wagging a finger at her. “You're matchmaking.”

“I am not, and don't you say a word. Silas suggested it, but Amanda needs a little help. Now, let me go find Caleb.”

By dinnertime, when they arrived at Jacob and Corinne's, she was bursting with curiosity about how the ride had gone. It must have gone well, because she couldn't see her buggy in the yard…and there were plenty of quiet lanes to drive on that might delay a couple's arrival.

Oh, how she hoped Amanda might hit it off with Silas. Her young sister-in-law was so shy that she could barely bring herself to speak to a young man, never mind be so forward as to suggest a ride home. She had her father's slimness and Corinne's blond coloring, and her own gentle spirit shone in her face. If she'd use the skin wash that Sarah planned to make to brighten up her complexion, any man would take a second look at her and like what he saw.

Not that a good husband would count a woman's looks to be of as much value as her faithful service to God, or her skill with
Kich
and
Kinner
, but you couldn't deny that getting his attention was a place to start.

Preparations for dinner were fairly leisurely, since Jacob planned to barbecue steak on the grill outside, and that meant that potatoes and vegetables didn't take long to prepare. Even still, Jacob's barbecue fork was in his hand and he was ready to begin when they finally heard the crunch of wheels in the lane.

Silas tied Dulcie to the rail while Amanda hurried into the kitchen, already unpinning her cape. Sarah followed her up to her room, where she found her changing into a soft green dress.

“Did you have a nice drive?”

Amanda turned eyes filled with pleading on her. “Oh, don't tease me. Cousin Zeke is going to make hay with this and I don't think I can bear it.”

“What does it matter,
Liewi?
As long as you enjoyed Silas's company, it doesn't make a bit of difference what anybody says. What did you talk about?”

Amanda pulled a bib apron off a peg, shrugged into it, and slowly tied it behind her. “Everything. Nothing. He told me a little about Colorado—different from what he said the other night—and he asked about Simon. About you, and your learning to make cures. About our Michael, and what a shock it was when he was diagnosed.”

“You took an awfully long time getting home.”

“He's not a fast driver. And we were talking.”

“That's
gut
. I'm glad to hear it.”

“Do you think he likes me, Sarah?”

Sarah pushed her shoulder off the door frame and crossed the room to give her a hug. “It would be impossible not to.”

“You're just saying that because you love me.”

“I'm saying it because it's the truth.”

“But you practically tricked him into driving me home.”

“If a man didn't want to in the first place, he couldn't be ‘tricked' into doing anything. I just gave him an opportunity, and he took it. What else did you talk about?”

At last Amanda calmed her agitation enough to smile. “Silly things. He doesn't believe that chickweed can be good for anything but feeding to chickens. I told him some of the things you do with it, but he still wasn't convinced.”

“You should sneak some into the salad tonight and see if he notices.”

Sarah smiled inside at Amanda's laughter. This was the girl she knew, not the anxious, tense person who was so unsure of herself that she could hardly enjoy a ride without worrying about being teased about it.

“I certainly will. That will teach him.”

They went down to supper then, and Amanda was as good as her word. And when she told Silas what she'd done, his laughter made everyone around the table smile and exchange interested glances.

Even Zeke didn't spoil the mood by making a joke or teasing Amanda to distraction.

It wasn't until later that night, after Sarah and Caleb had said their prayers together and she'd gone to bed, that she opened her eyes wide in the summer dark as a thought struck her.

Amanda and Silas had talked all the way home.

Was it her imagination that every subject seemed to have something to do with her?

Sarah shook her head at herself. That couldn't be. And she had better do some serious praying on the subject of pride.

O
n Monday, after she and her sisters made breakfast, and then she helped Mamm do the week's laundry, Priscilla arrived at the Rose Arbor Inn a few minutes after eight thirty. Thank goodness one of the Byler uncles had been going into town and had offered her a ride; otherwise, she'd have been nearly half an hour late. She was going to have to fetch her old scooter out of the barn, if Dat didn't relent soon, so she'd have a way to speed up the trip.

“Good morning, Ginny.” With a glance into the dining room, which was empty but set for breakfast, she knelt by the storage cupboard to get out the basket of cleaning supplies. “Has everyone gone for the day?”

“Oh, no,” Ginny said. “The Parkers aren't even down to breakfast yet. The weekenders I had in the other four rooms left yesterday afternoon, so you might as well get started in the Wild Rose Room.”

That was what Ginny called the attic, which had been opened up as a family suite and had a queen-sized bed as well as two bunk beds and a twin.

“But first, have a sticky bun. I just took them out of the oven.”

“I've already had breakfast, but thank you.” She didn't want to be here when Justin came down. If she was up on the third floor, and had any luck, he would have finished breakfast and gone out for the day before she was finished in the Wild Rose Room.

“A sticky bun isn't breakfast. Come on. I know you love them.”

Priscilla wavered. Ginny made the best sticky buns in the county, rich with cinnamon and pecans and melting sugar. And the floors weren't creaking with footsteps going back and forth upstairs. Maybe just this once. “Ohhh…all right.”

Which meant that the minute she sank her teeth into the luscious bun, sneakers padded down the stairs and Justin walked into the dining room. In the next second, he spotted her sitting at the prep table in the kitchen.

She should have gone up to the third floor as soon as Ginny had mentioned it. This was her punishment for indulging the lusts of the flesh. At least the kitchen was gated off. He could talk to her, but he couldn't come through and invade her space.

“Good morning, Justin,” Ginny said. “Can I get you some orange juice?”

“Sure, thanks. Hi, Priscilla Rose.”

Ginny gave her a puzzled look, but said nothing as she poured a glass of juice and handed it to him. “If you like, I'll put some mugs of coffee on a tray and you can take them up to your folks.”

Now it was his turn to look puzzled at the outlandish thought of doing something considerate for someone. “They'll be down in a few minutes. Dad's just getting out of the shower.”

“All right.” Clearly, Ginny knew better than to say what Priscilla was thinking. “Sticky bun?”

“Is that what that is?” he asked Pris, and she nodded, though she would rather have ignored him. “Okay. Cool.”

“What have you got planned for today?” Ginny asked him.

“I don't know. I guess my parents want to go to the Strasburg Rail Road and ride a train or something.”

“You'll enjoy that. I always do.”

“I doubt it. I stopped playing with trains when I was three. I figured maybe I'd hang out with Priscilla.”

“Priscilla has work to do. I don't pay her by the hour to provide entertainment for my guests.”

Thank goodness for Ginny. At this rate, Pris wouldn't have to talk to him at all.

“She doesn't have to entertain me. She can work and talk at the same time, can't you?” He appealed to Priscilla, who swallowed the last bite of bun as Ginny handed him his on a napkin.

She got up and washed her hands at the double sink. “I'd rather work than talk.”

“I think you've got it backward.” And he chuckled, as though that was a joke.

“She's Amish,” Ginny pointed out. “And like some of us, they don't mind working. In fact, the Amish think work is good for the soul.”

Justin shook his hair back as if he were squaring up to a challenge. “Want me to give you a hand making the beds and stuff, Priscilla?”

“No, thank you.”

She picked up the cleaning supplies and headed for the stairs.

“Why not? You'd get it done in half the time, and have the rest of the day off.”

“I would just go home and have more time to take the laundry in and do the ironing.”

“Who irons anymore?” He took a big bite of his bun as he followed her down the corridor. “Mm, this is good.”

“Justin, please leave Priscilla to her work,” Ginny called from the kitchen.

“Oh, she doesn't mind. Hey, I didn't know the Amish could wear flip-flops.”

“I mind.” Ginny came out of the kitchen with a look in her eye that Priscilla had never seen before. She took the opportunity to scamper up the flight to the landing. Once around the turn in the stairs, she could hear, but no one down there could see her—or her bare feet in their flip-flops.

“Dude, chill,” Justin protested. “Hey, give me back my bun.”

“One, my name is Ginny, not
dude
, and two, in this house we eat our food at the table—especially things as sticky as this. Right here, Justin, where I've set your juice.”

“I'm not a little kid.”

“You're behaving like one, and getting in my business. Now, sit.”

“I don't think I want the juice or the bun, thanks. I'm going back to my room.”

But by that time, Priscilla was on the third floor with the door to the Wild Rose Room closed.

And locked.

She had never been so glad to clean the big room, which took up most of the top floor. Every bed had been slept in, every bar of soap and towel used, and both bathrooms had been left in disarray, with trash all around the wastebasket. It took two hours to restore it to its usual welcoming order, with fresh soaps in their paper wrappings set out for the next guests, and fluffy towels hanging on the racks. The quilts on all the beds lay smoothly, clean sheets under them ready for tired bodies.

And the Parkers were gone off to the railroad.

It was hard to miss their departure, what with Justin arguing every step of the way. She didn't hear Eric's voice, but that wasn't surprising. The poor kid hardly had a chance to get a word in edgewise even when he did come out of his shell long enough to speak.

What a strange family. They seemed so disconnected, so out of tune with one another and the people around them. She knew that not all
Englisch
people were like that, so it couldn't just be the effect of the city. It had to start with Mr. and Mrs. Parker, who were amassing quite a cache of souvenirs in their room—even a bookcase they'd bought at the Amish Market that Pris had to clean around every morning—while their sons were going stir-crazy from boredom.

Their big SUV accelerated out of the parking lot and onto the road with hardly a pause to look for anything coming. With a sigh of relief, Priscilla picked up the basket of supplies, unlocked the door, and—

—practically fell over the body sitting on the top step of the staircase outside.

“Eric! What are you doing here? I thought you went with your family to the train.”

He put away his phone, on which he had been playing a game, and scrambled to his feet. Priscilla maneuvered past him and descended to the staircase landing, where the light was better and she could see his face.

He looked so abjectly miserable that her heart softened. An unhappy kid who was out of his element, and hardly older than Saranne. But Saranne had the advantage of a place in a family that loved her and showed it by giving her tasks that were hers alone, to support the rest of the family and help out. What did this boy have to do but go to school and play games on his phone?

“Is everything all right?”

He shrugged, and followed her down to the second floor, where she opened the door to the room his parents were staying in and put the basket on the floor.

“Why didn't you go to Strasburg? I think you would have liked the train. I always like it when I get a chance to stop and watch it go by, all puffing with steam and people waving out the windows.”

He shrugged.

“Justin seems to have gone, though he didn't want to.”

“They had tickets for eleven o'clock and had to leave. They looked for me, but not upstairs where you were.”

She stopped in the act of pulling the quilt off the bed. “You hid from them on purpose?”

Another shrug.

“Eric, what is going on? Why would you stay here in a house that's practically empty instead of doing something fun with your family on your holiday?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he watched her pull the sheets taut, tuck the corners in, and fold the top one back over the blanket, each layer precisely aligned with the one below. “Why do you make the beds when everyone is just going to mess them up again tonight?”

“Because that's my job.” She went around to the other side to do the same. “Besides, who wants to sleep in wrinkly old sheets? We don't change them every day, and it's much nicer to climb into a bed that's been made. Much nicer for people to look at a made-up bed during the day, too.”

“I keep my bedroom door closed.”

“If you made your bed, maybe you wouldn't have to.”

“I don't know how.”

She paused in the act of fluffing the pillows and aligning them. “You don't know how to make a bed? Didn't your mother teach you?”

“She doesn't make them. The house cleaner does, but we're never home when she comes.”

She indicated the quilt. “Toss that over, would you?”

He did, and she caught it, shaking it out over the bed. “Fold back the top and I'll put the pillows on it.”

He caught on quickly, and even helped her smooth the quilt down and tuck it in at the footboard.

“Come on and I'll show you how to do yours.”

Without waiting to see if he would follow her, she crossed the landing to the linen closet next to the bathroom and got fresh sheets, even though technically for a longer-term stay, they were only to change them every other morning.

“My sister and I can make a bed in less than a minute, top to bottom,” she said, stripping his sheets. “It goes way faster when there are two doing it. So. Fitted sheet first.” Snap. Pull. Tuck. “Top sheet.” Snap. “Hospital corners so it won't travel while you're sleeping.” She demonstrated. Pull up. Tuck under. “Blanket—just tuck it under the end of the mattress. Then fold the sheet on top of it. Good. Now the quilt and the pillows.”

She pretended to check the clock on the mantel. “Five minutes. Not bad for a beginner. Let's do the next one.”

They made Justin's bed in three minutes, but only because Eric told her not to bother with fresh sheets. Hiding a smile, she had him take the old ones off anyway and start from the beginning. “Otherwise we'll be cheating on the clock.”

By the time they had the beds made in the other three rooms, Priscilla was far enough ahead of schedule that she could go downstairs and fetch a couple of sticky buns as a treat.

“You do good work,” she said. “You could be a professional.”

For the first time, a smile flickered across his face. “There's more to it than I thought.”

“There is if you want a bed to look nice and be comfortable. Ginny wants everything to welcome her guests—and beds are important.”

“Guess I never thought about that before. What else do you have to do?”

“Tidy up, sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms, empty the wastebaskets. But I won't ask you to help me do that. Otherwise I'd be taking money that belongs to you for doing the work.”

“When do you get off?”

“When I'm done—usually around two. Ginny likes us to be finished then, because the guests begin checking in at three. Oh, and I have to dust and tidy up downstairs, too, but the bedrooms come first. And sometimes, if I have time, I cut flowers for the dining room and the entry hall.”

He shifted on the sofa in the reading niche, where they were enjoying their buns without a word from Ginny about sitting at the table. “What?” she asked.

“Are you going home along the creek?”

What an odd question. “I don't know.”
It depends on whether your brother is back by then.
“Maybe.”

“Do you think that guy will be there?”

“What guy?”

“That one who was talking to you the other day. When we came. The older guy with the sketchbook.”

“Oh, you mean Henry Byler. I don't know. He might have got enough inspiration that he doesn't need to come back. It's the first time I've seen him down there.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“
Ja.
He inherited my—”
Friend's? Special friend's?
No, that wasn't right, even though she and Joe were writing like special friends did.
Boyfriend's?
Yes, that was better. Then maybe Eric would pass it on to his persistent brother as a reminder. “My boyfriend's Aendi Sadie's place.”

“What's an ain-die?”

“Auntie. His aunt's place.”

“Can you show me?”

Finally Priscilla understood where this was going. “You want to see Henry again? Because of his sketchbook? Do you like pottery?”

Under his shaggy hair, which always seemed to be obscuring his face, his eyes held hers. They were green and vulnerable and fierce with an emotion she hadn't seen much before. Henry had it, though, when he was talking about his pots. And Sarah had it when she was making something and came out of herself enough to let it go.

Passion.

“
Ja
,” she said in response to an answer he hadn't given in words. “If you meet me down in the creek bottom where we saw him before at quarter past two, I'll take you over to his house.”

The gratitude that flooded his eyes was a gift—made all the more precious because it came from someone who had no practice in being thankful.